In a Surprise Verdict, Jury Says Developer Broke the Law by Whitewashing 5Pointz Graffiti Mecca — A very rare jury verdict finding a VARA violation. Eileen Kinsella of ArtNet reports, “The six-person jury found that real estate developer Gerald Wolkoff and his related companies broke the law when, in 2014, he whitewashed the 5Pointz graffiti mecca in Long Island City in the middle of the night. However, the jury decision will serve only as a recommendation to the case’s presiding judge, Frederick Block, who has yet to hand down a final verdict and assess whether any damages must be paid.”

Digital age changes all the rules on intellectual property — “Copyright law has served us well from the age of quills to the age of computers; and Congress has from time to time updated the law to stay abreast of new technologies, embracing photography, radio, sound recordings, movies, television, software, video games and more. Along the way, we became a literate and creative nation with the world’s most innovative, influential and lucrative creative industries. It’s now time for copyright laws to reflect the digital age.”

Something is wrong on the internet — A look at some of the creepy, partially algorithmically-generated videos found on YouTube’s platform geared toward children (given their consistent use of recognizable characters like Frozen’s Elsa and the Incredible Hulk, one might characterize them as part of “remix culture”). The author, James Bridle, concludes, “What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.”

Why Mark Zuckerberg’s Argument is Wearing Thin — A ‘free and open’ Internet has been an article of faith in and around Mountain View, Menlo Park, and its environs for two decades. The religious dogma, since the passage of two acts in 1996, generally holds that the Internet industry is somehow different and worthy of special protections. One act shields Internet companies from the liability they’d shoulder if they were considered to be publishers. (This is the legislation the sex-trafficking bill is amending.) The second exempts Internet companies from being sued for copyright infringement and other nasty behavior others might engage in on their platforms. Under this way of thinking, all the companies of Silicon Valley had to do was charge that something might hurt ‘innovation’ or threaten the ‘free’ nature of the Internet, and that something would be deemed bad. Remember SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a 2012 bipartisan measure the Internet industry summarily killed?”

About

Copyhype provides news and info on current developments relating to copyright law, the media industries, and the digital economy. It cuts through the hype to bring reasoned discussion aimed at both legal and nonlegal audiences.

Terry Hart is currently VP Legal Policy and Copyright Counsel at the Copyright Alliance. Any opinions expressed on this site remain his own and not necessarily those of his present or any past employers.